> It looks like the oldest posts are gone now, otherwise I'd link you to
> it, but my first posting to Newomic was to declare myself the winner,
> which, going by the rules that Sinblox started with, was perfectly
> legal.

Actually the posts are still there but you have to click the little 
dropdown box to change the display mode to longer than the past 45 days.

Anyway, I read those posts and I'm not convinced that you succeeded in 
winning the game with either of your early grabs at victory.  In each 
case, you had an interesting claim, but I don't think either was 
compelling enough to be successful.  Here is how I would rebuke each 
claim:

Claim 1. The rules permitted infinite votes.  By placing infinite votes
for yourself, you guaranteed victory.

Rebuttal: The condition for passing the rule is that the proposal get 
"50.1% of the votes."  In order for that condition to be met, the 
quantities of votes must have the percentile operator sensibly defined 
over them.  In order to use percentages, you've got to have a finite, 
divisible whole.  By declaring an infinite quantity of votes, you 
prohibited your proposal from passing.  Furthermore, it's not even clear 
that the time had come to tally the votes yet -- after all, the ballots 
had no set closing time so it would make sense to keep them open until no 
further votes could possibly shift the outcome.

Claim 2. The rules don't say you can't declare yourself winner, so there's
nothing stopping you from doing so.

This claim makes baseless suppositions about the structure of the game, 
picking and choosing traditional game concepts not established in the 
rules.  The fact that there would be a winner, and that this would have 
some meaning in the game, is one such concept.  The idea that anything not 
prohibited by the rules is permissible is just as arbitrary as saying that 
the rules have to be obeyed in the first place.  Which leads me to your 
next comment...

> The initial rules were not very well thought out at all -- most
> glaringly, the fact that the original Nomic Rule 101, which says,
> basically, that you have to play by the rules, was missing.

There's a chicken-and-egg problem here.  Who says you have to follow rule 
101?  If you're obliged to follow it, then there's no need for it.  The 
agreement to follow the rules of the game is implicit in the agreement 
that we are playing a game to begin with.  How many traditional games 
bother to say that cheating isn't allowed?  It's not necessary, because 
it's fundamental -- if you're cheating, i.e. not following the rules, you 
have ceased playing the game and commenced manipulating the other players 
in the real-life, outside-the-game sense.  Even an abstract game like 
Nomic takes place inside a sandbox.  If it didn't, there would be nothing 
preventing us from making rules saying you have to go kill people and the 
like.

To get back to the concept of winning, this is something that is *not* 
fundamental to the idea of a game.  The idea that somebody wins and the 
game ends represents an agreement formed between the players of the game.  
The satisfaction of being the winner lies not in the title itself, but the 
fact that the other players are required to acknowledge your victory on 
the basis of your prior mutual agreement.  Claiming victory in a game with 
no winner is analogous to claiming personal property in a state of perfect 
anarchy -- property is based on rights, which don't exist in anarchy 
because there's nothing to back them up.  If I say "this is mine," what I 
mean is "nobody has the right to take this from me."  It's a sticky 
philosophical issue in itself (cf. Hobbes' _Leviathan_), but perhaps the 
analogy is clear in any case.

> Luckly my hint was taken, but the fact remained (and still does, dispite
> your noble effort), that the rules in place are completely unsuited for
> playing in a message-board format.
> 
> I do think it's possible, however, to play via a message board, but
> there must be some firmer foundation than Nomic generally provides.
> Sinblox' Newomic, which was basically Nomic with a lot of the really
> important bits hacked off (immutable rules, judgement, play order, an
> initial winning condition, and the above mentioned Rule 101, to name a
> few) was even *less* structured. Most of the proposals last month were
> plugging holes in the initial rules that prevented play -- sadly, that's
> exactly what you're doing, too.

Let me state a couple of facts:
1. A message board with unrestricted registration provides, for the 
purposes of Nomic, an equivalent communications medium to email, 
especially if it offers private messaging.
2. There are people who quite happily play "Pure Nomic," which starts off 
with only 1 or 2 rules (generally "All players must agree to any changes 
in the game," and sometimes Rule 101 if they feel it necessary in spite of 
the chicken-and-egg argument I made above).  These games have been 
successfully run over email.

Since you can run an even less structured Nomic game over email, it can't 
be the case that Newomic was doomed on the basis of its initial rule set 
and communication medium.  If anything, it had too *many* rules -- after 
all, the problem you  mentioned below about the admin being the only one 
able to start threads in the voting forum was purely a result of an extra 
rule that could have been omitted.

In a sense, Newomic was a failure (though perhaps not unrecoverable) 
because the players did abandon it.  But that is a real-world problem, not 
a game-world problem.  I think that in a more important sense it did not 
fail, because even though it was very tumultuous, it did maintain its 
internal consistency.  The game didn't end, there were no unresolvable 
disputes or paradoxes or coups, and the door was open for players to 
develop all the mechanical rules you see as necessary.

> With a message board, I think you have to block off certain loopholes,
> in a very fixed fashion, much more so than Nomic's immutable rules.  In
> my flirtations with creating a new internet-friendly ruleset I called
> them "mechanical rules", which were there basically to correct for some
> of the weirdness that the particular medium could create.

I see nothing wrong with defining such rules.  However, I think it's a 
matter of taste rather than feasibility.  The appeal of Nomic is its 
flexibility, of course, and there is something really cool about order 
arising out of chaos.  The greater the chaos, the more impressive it is 
when it organizes itself.  Newomic was(is) in the process of such 
self-organization, and if it can attract some players who will stick with 
it, then it will be all the stronger for having been bootstrapped in that 
manner.

> (To use Newomic as an example -- the fact that Sinblox as the admin was
> the only one that could start threads in the voting forum gave him a
> theoretical advantage.

The separation of the forums was a mechanical issue and, as I said, 
derived from an unnecessary rule.  But the same sort of thing could have 
come up from short-sighted rulemaking in the game proper, not realizing 
the potential for abuse.

[snip stuff about mechanical rules]
> Initial rules governing this kind of thing are what I would call
> mechanical rules, and they would necessarily vary depending on the
> technical setup of the message board, mailing list, or whatever.
> 
> The test I use is : "If this is changed, will the
> game be pretty fucked up/unplayable.")

I don't think Newomic was fucked up or unplayable.

> (This is all assuming that you wouldn't want the position of admin to be
> subject to the game -- which is generally a bright idea.  I sure as hell
> wouldn't want some other player's grubby mitts all up in *my* server.  
> But if you were playing amongst friends, I suppose it might work.)

Well, I think Nomic players are probably a pretty harmless bunch overall 
but of course they're still strangers in this case.  But you've got what I 
think is the right idea here -- to the greatest extent possible, the 
domain of the game should be unrestricted.  Obviously the real world does 
have its borders that the game can't tread upon, but it would be 
interesting to see things like forum moderation be "in bounds" for the 
game.  Even if you never go crazy making rules which edit and delete 
messages and whatnot, the fact that you *could* gives the game that much 
more freedom.

> I would suggest, instead of trying to revive Newomic, to try to
> formulate a new rule set.  The main advantage is that you can just skip
> having to debate and vote on all sorts of minor details, and get into
> the more enjoyable insanity that Nomic generally becomes.

Perhaps.  At the moment I'm too busy to take on a project like that -- I 
can be an enthusiastic player, not an administrator.  So for now I'll try 
to pour some gas on the coals and see if I can't help make something out 
of what's there, because while your criticisms do have validity and the 
game has had trouble getting off the ground, I think it can still work out 
quite well.

> In summary, I'm declining your invitation to jump back onto Newomic.  
> But I respect your effort.  Feel free to drop me a line later if things
> take off without me, though, or perhaps you devise a new game.
>
> -"I Have <50><"

Yeah, that's right (and no way to spend it).  Interesting detail I was 
considering -- even though your votes didn't count for passing the 
proposal, they still netted you the fish (no pun intended).  Though we 
didn't actually pass the fish rule, so they're just points.  But I like 
the little fishie thing.  <50><

Anyway, I'll let you know if things pick up at all like I'm hoping they 
will.  After all, entropy can only decrease, right? ;)

Luke